I have the vast majority of the domains I own on a VPS, but for the purposes of this ecommerce project I wanted to get something separate. Since I initially wasn't sure which cart system I wanted to go with, I wanted a package that included Softaculous, so I could install, customize, backup, uninstall, reinstall, and experiment with different carts (AbanteCart, Prestashop, Cubecart, Open Cart, Magento, OSCommerce, etc.).
My other requirements were SSD, allocated RAM, a decent amount of diskspace and bandwidth, free SSL, and SSH access to be able to tweak without having to do everything via sFTP.
After doing a fair amount of research at webhostingtalk.com and testing sales responsiveness and technical acumen prior to making a choice, I opted for HostRush. I signed up for their "Rush-1" package at $23.99 per year, pricing locked in moving forward. It has all the features on my wantlist (24GB SSD, 1.5GB allocated RAM, unlimited bandwidth).
I haven't gone public with my storefront, so I cannot speak as to the performance under traffic, but I installed and uninstalled probably a half dozen ecommerce installations in my experimentation and have encountered no performance issues. Everything has been spritely and nimble. No outages (that I'm aware of at any rate) thus far.
